Family as a grafted tree

Recently I have been very interested in my family ancestry. Many of my literature courses focus on our concepts of ethnicity and the concept of home. Coming from a family of divorce and adoption these are interesting for me to define. Which sides of the family do I feel the strongest ties with, how do you visually represent divorce but a family evolving to continue as a unit, etc.

It is a common mistake that people confuse my last name with the Sequoia tree. Similar sounds, very different spelling and meaning. Looking at photos of these trees their expansive but hidden roots come strongly to mind. I imagine my father's biological family this way, the creation of the tree but hidden. The branches are much farther from the roots illustrating this distance between the adoptive and biological families. I would place my nuclear family somewhere on the trunk trying to bridge these familial ties. What about the splice of a tree trunk? Who do the rings represent and how do we choose where it began from? Do these rings relate to the branches and roots?

I am also interested in how to represent our patch worked family in a less traditional way. Similar to how I am interested in people piecing their land to create home I am very interested in how people piece the people in their lives to create family; the aunt who was a childhood best friend or next door neighbor your children grew up calling papa, all of these nontraditional parts being so important.

The Bushwick Book Club Map

I have recently become involved with The Bushwick Book Club, a group that reads books monthly then writes songs to perform on stage for a one-time show. I want to create a project that catalogs the first year of their book choices. Crazy quilts, block quilts, even non-traditional piecing didn't seem to address what I was really interested in. The feeling of being consumed in another world, becoming familiar with unfamiliar people and places through text. My fascination with location, home, and land boundaries (especially in regards to my move to Seattle) seemed like a completely separate inspiration until I was driving to work this morning.

My long commute (in Seattlite terms)from Columbia City to Woodinville every morning brings me from my 1 bedroom apartment off of a highly populated main drag to an A-frame cabin in the woods. I easily separate my home life from my work life with such a drastic environment change. I feel the same shift when I sit down to read a novel and enter the world an author has created. I lose myself in the character's dilemmas and neighborhoods. The same feeling occurs to me every month at BWBC. There is such a strong support between all the artists, the Can-Can transforms to the setting of our novel through music, costumes, and lyrics. I want to illustrate that organic connection we all form between novels, Seattle, Bushwick, and the artist community.

The quilt is going to be a map to my world through BWBC. Tralfamadore, Flourin and Gilder, Narnia, King Arthur's court, Bushwick Brooklyn, the Can-Can.... all synthesized into the connections I draw between each as a map. I will explore ways to connect land and places that don't exist except for in stories with places we live in and know, how to create a map to something undefinable in our everyday life, a non-traditional connection of themes through physical representation. A map to our Bushwick Book Club.